Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Idle No More Los Angeles offered drumming, prayer, poetry, and healing at the September 3rd protest at the downtown Pacific Oil Conference and Trade Show. Called “The Western Summit” for petroleum marketers, around 50 people demonstrated peacefully, holding down the corner of a busy thoroughfare of LA Live! for three hours, in the shadow of the towering new Marriott-Ritz Carlton.
Chief Oren Lyons, distinguished member of the United Nations Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival, lectures on what happened to the millions of indigenous people who lived in North and South America when they were “discovered” and the past and present challenges for the Peacemakers, recently featured on KPFK’s “American Indian Airwaves.” Listen to the first part of the speech below. We also included a short talk from the Sacred Land Film Project.
Baja California, despite proximity to the US and recent rampant growth, remains a wild and untamed coastal desert. Behind the charming pueblitos and peaceful resorts lies a varied history where conquest and development have moved both slow and fast. Following a recent trip to the Gulf of California town of Loreto, this first in a series of articles attempts to define what makes the place special, as well as what the future holds for this (mostly) hidden resort region.
Idle No More has awakened indigenous voices from all over North America, blockading highways and border crossings, flash-mobbing in shopping malls, facing arrest and imprisonment. At issue are sovereignty and treaty rights, dancing and demonstrating for Mother Earth: for the protection of the air, the water, and the land, motivating native peoples out of their idleness and into the streets.
Ikland recounts a quest to re-connect with the Ik people. For producer Cevin Soling, they represented the last outpost of imagination in a world devoid of myth. Soling and his crew risked their lives by traveling through war-ravaged northern Uganda to reach them. Their experience was alien and surreal in ways only Jonathan Swift might have imagined…
The Kallawaya cosmovision is based upon thousands of years of experiential knowledge about their environment and shared among many other communities across the High Andes. At the center of the cosmovision is the notion that humanity must live in harmony with the environment. Illness is the result of a spiritual dissonance caused by some sort disconnect between a person and his or her environment. One of the main tenets of the Kallawaya cosmovision is an ethic of reciprocity that is applied equally to people, communities, and the environment.
Groups of Kumeyaay People live in the isolated canyons of the Tijuana River watershed, high in the Baja California peninsula. They harvest acorns and pine nuts, hunt rattlesnake and small animals, collect grasses to weave baskets. They allow a glimpse of what life in Southern California before the Spanish arrived was like.